Tag: overpopulation

Deer Birth Control

  • Gardiner Joe Williamson says sterilization does nothing to solve the immediate problem of too many deer. (Photo courtesy of Adam Allington)

Whitetail deer have adapted pretty well to the suburbs. But… it means a lot of car-deer accidents. It also means deer munching on tulips and shrubs. Some people consider them pests and want to get rid of the deer. But instead of simply killing them, one city has decided to capture and sterilize a number of does.
Adam Allington reports, the results might point toward the future of urban wildlife management.

Transcript

Whitetail deer have adapted pretty well to the suburbs.

But… it means a lot of car-deer accidents. It also means deer munching on tulips and shrubs. Some people consider them pests and want to get rid of the deer.

But instead of simply killing them, one city has decided to capture and sterilize a number of does.

Adam Allington reports, the results might point toward the future of urban wildlife management.

It’s a crisp night in Town and Country, Missouri…home to some 10,000 souls…and about 800 deer.

“There goes a deer over there, it’s just to the left of the tree, you can barely see it.”

Joel Porath is a wildlife regional supervisor for the Missouri Department of Conservation. Just like humans, whitetails he says, are right at home in the quiet cul du sacs of suburbia.

“They have all the food resources, they don’t have hunting and they don’t really have predators, so mainly vehicles are what kill them in communities like this.”

Lynn Wright sits on Town and Country’s board of aldermen. Despite the accidents she says most folks like seeing the deer around…kind of reminding them that they don’t live in the city.

“But when you start going from 2 or 3 and seeing 10 or 12 in the backyard you do start getting concerned about that.”

The car accidents were a problem, but Wright says people also complained about damaged trees and landscaping. Still, the town resisted the easiest solution—to just hire sharpshooters to come in and kill all the deer.

Instead, they explored alternative methods…this is sound from a department of conservation video…it shows four deer eating corn in a back yard…just then, a large dropnet is released…sending them into a flailing frenzy until technicians rush in with tranquilizer shots.

The deer are then brought to Steve Timm. Timm is a veterinarian with White Buffalo Incorporated. Its a company that specializes in sterilizing deer.

“We’ve got two does coming in. We’re going to sterilize them by removing ovaries.”

Timm operates out of a small eight by sixteen foot trailer… When the does arrive they’re hoisted on to an operating table and prepped for surgery.

“I’ve located the left ovary here, and so I’ll clamp it, bring it to the surface, use cautery to prevent any bleeding.”

The whole process takes about 20 minutes. The deer are then stapled up, fitted with reflective collars and released.

Timm says the theory is simple—fewer fauns mean less deer eating shrubs and running into cars.

“The early information suggests, that if there are some deer in the environment, especially our sterile does, the other deer have less tendency to move in.”

But not everyone backs the sterilization approach.

Joe Williamson is a retiree who loves to garden. Walking around his yard he points out flowering magnolias, yews, Japanese maples…basically, a kind of all-night deer buffet.

“This is a good example of antler rubs, this is called Staghorn Sumac. The bucks rub their antlers on here and they break them off, you see all these…its just wrecked.”

Williamson says sterilization does nothing to solve the immediate problem of too many deer. It’s also much more expensive. Town and Country paid White Buffalo 150-thousand dollars to sterilize 112 does, and kill another 100.

But, Joel Porath of the Department of Conservation says in the end, the best solution may involve sterilizing some deer…and killing others.

“Could you imagine if we stopped allowing deer hunting in the state? You know we kill around 300,000 dear each year and it doesn’t take very long for the population to jump back up. So, they do need to continue to do something in Town and Country down the road.”

By the end of spring Porath says the department should have enough information to see if sterilization makes sense for other suburban areas.

For The Environment Report, I’m Adam Allington.

Related Links

Study Finds Deer Reduce Forest Diversity

A soon-to-be-published study concludes that deer overpopulation is having a devastating, long-term impact on forests. The study will come out next month in the journal Ecological Applications. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Cindi Deutschman-Ruiz reports:

Transcript

A soon-to-be-published study concludes that deer overpopulation is having a
devastating, long-term impact on forests. The study will come out next month in the
journal Ecological Applications. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Cindi Deutschman-Ruiz reports:


The U.S. Forest Service study was conducted in Pennsylvania’s
Allegheny National Forest. It examined deer densities
ranging from 10 deer to 64 deer per square mile.
As deer increased, tree species declined.


Red maple, sugar maple, white ash, yellow poplar, and
cucumber trees were all adversely affected, and native yew has been practically eradicated in the forest.


Steve Horsley is the study’s co-author. He says the next step is to determine
whether the impact of deer on forests is as great in areas where there
are also housing developments and
farmland.


“Deer tend, for example, when agriculture is in the mix, to
spend their time eating alfalfa and corn,
which have more digestible energy than most of the
plants that you find in the woods.”


Horsely says in the meantime, deer populations must come down,
preferably to less than 20 per square mile. In the Allegheny National Forest, that would mean cutting the
population in half.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Cindi Deutschman-Ruiz.

GAUGING MANKIND’S ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT

In the wake of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, there’s been a lot of talk about how to balance human needs with the health of the planet. Ecologists have been trying to measure the impact of humans on the environment for a number of years, with some sobering results. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Daniel Grossman went to the New York Botanical Garden recently to gauge mankind’s ecological footprint:

Transcript

In the wake of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South
Africa, there’s been a lot of talk about how to balance human needs with the health of the
planet. Ecologists have been trying to measure the impact of humans on the environment
for a number of years, with some sobering results. The Great Lake Radio Consortium’s Daniel Grossman went to the New
York Botanical Garden recently to gauge mankind’s ecological footprint.


[Rain forest sounds, misters, tinkling of water, rain falling on leaves]


To get a good sense of the impact humans are having on earth, you could travel for weeks
on intercontinental plane flights, river boats and desert jeeps. Or, as Columbia University
biologist, Stuart Pimm suggested, visit a botanical garden. There, under the glass and
ironwork of a conservatory, Pimm says you can see a resource that humans are
over-using – Earth’s most important resource, its plant-life.


“We’re sitting in the rain forest here at the New York Botanical Society. And it’s a riot of
green.”


Professor Pimm says here beneath the misters in the Tropical Rain Forest Gallery is a
good place to start a whirlwind tour of Earth’s greenery. The air is heavy with moisture
and sweet-smelling.


“Rain forests are some of the most productive parts of the planet. They grow extremely
quickly and they are therefore generating a lot of biological production.”


What Pimm calls biological production most of us know as plant growth. Biologists say
all this green growth in tropical forests and elsewhere on Earth is the foundation upon
which all life rests.


“Everything in our lives is dependent upon biological productivity – everything that we
eat, everything that our domestic animals eat.”


And everything that every other animal eats as well. In a recent book, Pimm painstakingly
tallies up how much biological productivity we use. He starts with the rain forest. In the
last 50 years, loggers and settlers have cut down 3 million square miles of lush tropical
forests. Much was cut down for subsistence agriculture, a purpose Pimm says it serves
poorly.


“Although the tropical forest looks rich and productive, it is a very special place. And
when you chop that forest down the areas that replace it often become very, very much
less productive.”


[Sound of walking around conservatory]


Pimm speaks of the toll on greenery of cities and roads and of land converted to farming
in temperate regions such as the U.S. Midwest. Then, trekking along the botanical
garden’s gravel paths, he leaves behind the tropical mists and steps into the dry heat of a
Southwestern desert. Deserts and other dry lands are not very productive, but they
account for a substantial fraction of Earth’s land surface. Most of it is grazed by flocks of
sheep, goats, camels and cattle, often causing severe damage to vegetation. When these
uses are added to the other impacts of humanity on earth’s bounty, the results are
surprisingly large.


“What silence has shown is that we are taking 2/5ths of the biological production on land,
a third from the oceans. And that of the world’s fresh water supply, we’re taking half.”


[Fade out sound of conservatory. Fade up sound of Texas frogs.]


[Sound of plane engines]


Frogs and toads croak out a spring mating ritual in a concrete drainage ditch. Nearby, a
pilot practices maneuvers in a small plane occasionally drowning out the amphibian
serenade. Living in culverts, sharing the night with droning engines, these wild animals
are never completely free of human influences. From his Stanford University office,
Professor Peter Vitousek says wherever you look, the din of human activities is
interrupting and crowding out other species. Vitousek made one of the first attempts to
tally the impact of people on plant productivity in 1985.


[Frogs fade out in time for Vitousek’s act]


“The message to me was that we are already having a huge impact on all the other species
because of our use of the production of Earth and the land surface of Earth. That’s not
something that our models predict for some time in the future or something that we’re
guessing at on the basis of fairly weak information. It’s something that we’re clearly
doing now. That’s already happening.”


Many ecologists say this conclusion is beyond doubt. What they can’t say is whether
human domination of so much of nature’s output is good or bad. University of Minnesota
Professor David Tilman says as a member of the human race himself, he appreciates the
comforts in clothing, shelter and food our lifestyles buy us. And he acknowledges that the
survival of our own species is probably not imperiled – at least for the moment – by the
destruction of others. Still, he wonders if someday we’ll regret today’s resource intensive
practices.


“I think the more relevant question to me is, ‘Are we doing this wisely?’ ‘Are we wisely
appropriating the resources of the world?’ So, my concern is that we live in a balanced
way – a way that is sustainable through generations – that we leave our children and
grandchildren the same kind of world that we have.”


An expert on the impacts of agriculture, Tilman says we’re using up more resources than
can be replaced. He says if we don’t grapple with these important issues now, by the time
the human population reaches eight to ten billion or so people later this century, it might
be too difficult for us to do enough to save the planet’s life as we know it today.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Daniel Grossman.

Invasive Beetle Swarms the Region

The Great Lakes region has been invaded by another non-native species. But this one may be more beneficial than it is a nuisance. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tracy Samilton reports on the Asian ladybird beetle:

Transcript

The Great Lakes region has been invaded by another non-native species. But this one may be more beneficial than it is a nuisance. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tracy Samilton reports on the Asian ladybird beetle.


They’re everywhere, it seems: landing on us and pacing up and down the windows of our homes. The ladybug look-alikes were first introduced in the South. And they’ve since moved north. Tom Ellis is an entomologist at Michigan State University.


“All throughout the year they’ve been doing good things. They’ve been feeding on insects that suck plant juices and damage plants, especially plants of agricultural interest, and during the fall they migrate into areas where’re they’re looking for cavities to hibernate in, and as people see, they do this in large numbers.”


The bugs main prey is aphids and last year’s healthy aphid population means a lot of beetles too. The beetles are probably here to stay and there may be even more of them next year. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tracy Samilton.

Deer Hunt Controversy

With deer populations on the rise throughout the country, many communities are looking for ways to curb their growth. Near Cleveland, some park managers have asked for a permit to shoot deer in a controlled hunt, claiming overpopulated deer herds are damaging park vegetation. But local deer advocates strongly disagree and so far they’ve been able to block the deer hunt in court. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Ley Garnett reports: